Our global species is confronted with the converging crisis of climate change, unsustainable levels of inequality, mass extinction, and growing water and natural resource scarcity that are threatening the existential crisis of collapse. This fallout has already led to massive displacement and refugee crisis across Latin America and the African continent. New democratic social movements are recombining and ushering in new opportunities for a revolution of regenerative settlements to be built out across the globe. Doing so, can create new opportunities to restore biodiversity, bring the atmosphere to safe operating levels, lift billions into unprecedented human prosperity, and transform global governance to promote a new era cooperation, human discovery and peaceful co-existence.

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Our global species is confronted with the converging crisis of climate change, unsustainable levels of
inequality, mass extinction, and growing water and natural resource scarcity that are threatening the
existential crisis of collapse. This fallout has already led to massive displacement and refugee crisis
across Latin America and the African continent. New democratic social movements are recombining and
ushering in new opportunities for a revolution of regenerative settlements to be built out across the
globe. Doing so, can create new opportunities to restore biodiversity, bring the atmosphere to safe
operating levels, lift billions into unprecedented human prosperity, and transform global governance to
promote a new era cooperation, human discovery and peaceful co-existence.
Rebecca Solnit in Every Protest Shifts the World’s Balance offers an eloquent conceptualization of the
historical transformation occurs within social movements over generations, through lineages that span
continents of our globe, can be expressed via various forms of collective action whether in the streets,
the institutions of government, in progressive social-entrepreneurial businesses and civic organizations.
The shapes of these movements form emergent dynamic patterns, in part, based the opportunity
structure of the political landscape, their ability to mobilize and apply pressure, and the momentum
they gain by shared victories of varying levels of significance. The Anti-Slavery and Womens’ Suffrage
movements in the United States were emboldened by the abolitionists actions in England, the north
winning the Civil War, and solidarity of movement actors across the globe (e.g. similar as how the 1954
Brown vs. Board of Education decision sparked the Civils Rights Movement). The velocity in which these
movements sprout, and effect change are a function of their interconnectedness, the mediums that
shape their exchanges, and the degree of harmonization and alignment of policy goals and mechanisms.
While our struggles for racial, social, and environmental justice emerged over centuries, we are entering
a new phase in accelerated revolutionary action occurring on the scale of years and decades. These
efficacy of these movements to effect change, in part, depend upon our ability to design and implement
regenerative human settlements that rise above adversity to meet the dreams of today and tomorrow.

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Transnational protests often emerge through what Katherine Sikkink and Margaret Keck call a
“boomerang strategy”. As activists face local obstacles, they call out to the world for solidarity and to
apply pressure back onto their leaders from above and from the side. Today’s social movements taking
place across Latin America, Africa, United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and other places in the world are
in many ways similar; demanding racial, environmental, and social justice and deepened democracy. In
this quickening, how movements react to each other and recombine gives us a form of traction; an edge
to climb. Social movements are engulfed in spiral dynamics and are more interconnected than ever
before thus harmonizing our goals and strategic mobilization recalibration makes making new history on
our planet more possible than ever.
New Democratic Movements Afoot Across the African Continent
Egypt was a watershed moment in the quickening of social movements. The 2011 Tahir Square protests
were some of the first examples of mass protest accelerated through social media. Men and women,
even while being beaten back by police, were successful in amassing hundreds of thousands of people in
what were unprecedented calls for democracy after decades of military dictatorship. And movements,
like a soccer game, are dynamic and flow with momentum. In the square they looked to democratic
countries to support them. Many of us still remember the clutch moment when European and American
countries were issuing statements in solidarity with the Egyptian people and Joe Biden felt compelled to
defend Hosni Mubarak telling the American people was not a dictator. It is this type of inconsistency
that has led to an ebb of democracy around the globe, but we are fighting to reverse that flow.
Figure 1.1 Transnational Social Movements often employ a Boomerang Strategy to affect International Relations (Keck & Sikkink, 2005)

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Across Africa, in the face of unprecedented displacement and migrations, there are many movements
today that are reshaping the democratic landscape and providing the opportunity for a regenerative
future. In Egypt, at least some of the democratic mechanisms were initiated and can support the culture
of democracy and provide the possibility for effective and just collaborative governance moving
forward. Tunisia is showing the rest of the world the excitement and challenges of rewriting a
constitution and the subsequent codification of new laws and institutional procedures that complement
a democratic transition. In Algeria and Sudan, the convergences of middle class technical and policy
types with the popular movements are standing up to military rule and deepening their demands that
go beyond simply electing representatives. Political representatives are a default mechanism in any
representative democracy, some are good most aren’t, and they alone cannot be relied upon as sole
change makers. What really makes democratic societies thrive are associational spaces, a supporting
infrastructure for entrepreneurs and small businesses, arts and media, scientists and engineers, vibrant
community, education, health care and effective natural resource management. Democracies provide
the space of expression for people to find their purpose while regenerative value chains provide the
connective tissue through which these goals are produced and achieved. The movements in South Africa
for land redistribution offers important inspiration for post-colonialist equity policies. The Democratic
Republic of Congo has shown solidarity in the face of brutal repression of paramilitaries. This is made
more difficult by elusive shadowy forces that create waves of fear over the citizens. A unified and
cohesive community of progressive social-oriented business, civic organizations, and residents in the
Congo can resist these onslaughts and enact change with international support and solidarity.
Image 1.2 Protestors and the emergence of the Social-Technical Committee of Sudan 2019

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The Egyptian regime’s support for military dictators in Sudan shows us how fundamentally inadequate
military institutions are when they try to govern civilian populations and protect their own interests. To
them Sudanese problems are not something to be solved, rather a threat to be suppressed. The
Egyptian military has placed a mark on every citizen of Sudan. These regimes only use force as a
deterrent and are incapable of solving the challenges of climate change, poverty, over consumption, and
natural resource management. The continuous arms cycle and sales of weapons in Africa to
paramilitaries across the continent that in turn clandestinely support military regimes must be broken,
in part from pressure within the US and other countries who sell these weapons, and replaced with tools
that organized citizens can utilize to build regenerative settlements to usher in the next level human
social organization while restoring biodiversity, increasing prosperity, and resolving climate change.
Migrant Caravans Across Latin America represent a new form of Contentious Collective Action
In Latin America, mass migration represents a new repertoire of contentious collective action that must
be met with new governance approaches. These popular caravans are straining existing institutional
designs of the nation-state on migration and require creative problem-solving approaches while
prioritizing the importance of each person affected by the crisis. The detainment and separation of
families that are placed in American concentration camps or the tent cities for refugees in Africa are in
no way on par on how to solve this issue. That Mexico is prioritizing a military response to deal with the
border crisis is no doubt a response to the threats made by Trump for a quick fix and do not address the
root causes of the horrendous situation. We must work to restore natural ecologies, economic
opportunity, and provide families the opportunity to make a better life wherever they choose to live.
Image 1.3 Mass migrations of people fleeing Venezuela

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These new approaches to safely and effectively settle refugees and immigrants should be designed not
considering the current flows of today but of what we can anticipate in the next 20-30 years as climate
change sets in. As we continue to plunder natural resources and increase our demand for cheap readily
available consumer goods, these conditions will only get worse. In the United States, we lucked out by
not having floods that were predicted to affect 200 million people this spring. Severe flooding that could
affect 2 out of 3 Americans is now a latent risk every year. The UN estimates that by 2050 there will be
roughly 150 million people displaced from climate change. Universities and planners at places like MIT
have begun GIS modeling of current migration spatial patterns flows and volumes to predict how and
where urban and rural populations will reconfigure and by how much. Yet, these types of simulations
take place in a vacuum and are not based on policy interventions at the national and regional level. They
often do not take into account strategic planning, incentives, and all-around systems design which can
alter and optimize these flows to prepare for the influx and to dig in with planners, advocates, and policy
makers to build the regenerative regions of today and tomorrow. This type of modeling must be
complemented with standardized government and hyperlocal data to illuminate the currents for which
urban policies can be created to absorb and, in some cases, strategically nudge in better directions.
We can utilize predicted trajectories of free-flowing refugees to conceptualize a redesign of immigration
and regenerative regional policies to create positive gravitational forces. From a systems design lens, it’s
important to note refugees are merely a symptom of, at least two, deeper issues: all human settlements
today are unbalanced with their natural surroundings and we have an economic system that has left
families so deprived that they would risk drowning or terminal dehydration while crossing a desert in
exodus to seek new opportunity. This means we must redesign the function and performance of our
regional settlements to bring them in balance with the natural ecology and in a manner that can provide
prosperity. This challenge is local, national, hemispherical, and global and requires iterative hyperlocal
solutions and international cooperation across the Americas, Africa, Europe, Middle East & Asia.
Image 1.4 Modeling projected displacement and impacts on populations

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Regenerative Transformations: Sewing the threads of Democracy and Caravan Movements Together
as Leverage in Regenerative Regional Settlements Construction
While the effects of inadequate natural resource management and unstable populations have reached a
tipping point, we mustn’t design our settlements in a defensive mode of simply absorbing new
populations to sustain extraction. We need an offensive strategy that is transformative and can align us
in where we want to be over the next several decades taking seriously next civilization level evolution.
As we become more complex and interconnected as a species, our challenges become even greater and
require more and more energy, cooperation, and more sophisticated design principals to ensure our
human settlements are functioning on “multiple layers of efficiencies”. All sub-system outputs must be
harnessed and feed into a circular process of betterment and prosperity locally and globally. It follows,
the threads of democracy and displacement movements can be sown together and leveraged to create
emergent effects in the rebuilding of regenerative regional human settlements.
Those of thus that have awakened to toll of human suffering and these grand challenges in front of us.
Those of us that can hear under the breath of the banal tonality of callous politicians and will not be
deterred in the face of great adversity; we have several fundamental tasks ahead of us. Activists and
policy makers are now redesigning our settlements to bring 2-3 billion citizens of earth online and into a
renewable and regenerative future. These estimates of population growth and our ability to sustain such
numbers are based upon, in part, our ability to effectively design regenerative institutions and family
planning practices (see Figure 1.2). vary upon We are redesigning our settlements not only so that we
can live regeneratively here on Earth, but we are also teaching ourselves the necessary skills to thrive on
Mars and other celestial bodies in the next decade and on course over the span of several decades.
And this something that cannot be designed in a vacuum rather with a robust community engagement
model. We are learning a new skill and this is something we must practice, to get good at. The refugee
problem becomes a tremendous opportunity to, in some cases, start settlement construction from
scratch in a new rural area and in others to inject a population into a recipient region as a catalyst to
renew a city, begin the regeneration process and rebuild the ecology and well-being of the community.
Adding billions of new members to our regenerative regions means that we must design our human
settlements to self-sustain their human inhabitants while being regenerative in their outputs. This
regeneration takes place in the soil and groundwater, on surface ecologies, within the social and cultural
communities they permeate, and the atmosphere from which they breathe. These settlements generate
and positive social, cultural, economic, and natural capital and allocate this capital in optimal volumes
among their agents. Systems such as endogenous regenerative economic growth strategies do not
negate exchange or trade among regions, rather they are fundamental base system to ensure resilient
thriving in the event of disruption or lack of readily available flow as in initial off-word settlements.

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Figure 1.2 Family planning strategies and impacts upon projected global populations
Meeting the demand for renewable energy and communications technology for the growing
populations of Africa, Asia, Middle East, and the Americas means, in part, we increase our reliance on
precious rare Earth minerals. A challenge to the notion of self-sufficiency, yet this unique challenge
represents an opportunity to learn new skill sets we will undoubtedly carry with us off-world. For
example, innovations in regenerative mining and mineral harvesting and the production of renewable
energy batteries and materials for this unprecedented demand brings us back to the questions of why
we organize are economic systems of value creation and exchange in the first place. If our pursuit is
based upon the externalization of costs and oversimplified production processes to generate and horde
a trillion zeros of some arbitrary currency the landscape and people of Africa will bear this cost. That
scenario of a ravaged landscape such as mountain top removal in the United States, a cleared rainforest
in Brazil, and populations who live in places of abundant natural resources yet are shackled by extreme
poverty is unacceptable to the conscious and enlightened citizens of our home planet. In a regenerative
global society, we can no longer pursue the cheapest and easiest path to acquire a system input while
wasting natural and human capital potential in the process.
Our challenge is, in part, to innovate the engineering, governance, and collaborative socio-economic
systems to ensure equatorial countries of Africa rise and are lifted in this exchange and the lush
ecologies are restored to their original state. We must reconceive “costs” as additional locales and
nodes of opportunities for regeneration to be internalized into any production process. More clearly
stated: the challenge is not how to amass wealth that becomes externalized to the process (e.g. banks
accounts in the Cayman Island) rather to invest in the technologies, materials, processes, and human
capital development that can lead to highly sophisticated engineering processes that are 100% efficient
in their use of resources with no waste or environmental destruction. Regenerative growth
reconceptualized, thus supersedes the degenerative inertia of stagnation of extractive processes on the
land and people and occurs, not in external non-value producing nodes, rather in active agents
connected to the process and in the linkages of exchange thus nourishing regenerative conduits.

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The materials and designs we innovate for our regenerative regions today should also be designed to
serve dual purposes of functioning in space and celestial bodies in addition to here on earth whenever
and to the degree that it is feasible. This design principal of calibrating the spatial distribution of
optimized populations within and across constellations of regenerative regions carries in Martian and
any off-world context if we conceive our new regenerative regions as, in part, terra-formers. As such our
distributed settlement patterns take on an emergent morphology because we are utilizing the billions
and billions of terrestrial life forms - interwoven and in balance with their natural landscapes - to
regenerate our atmosphere. The inter-regional human settlements thus create natural capital
economies of scale in nested ecological niches such as the Great Lakes Basin of the United States, the
equatorial rainforest belt and Great Lakes Region of Africa, the reaches of the Nile, and, as regenerative
systems pioneer John D Lui points out; the Sinai Peninsula. Regenerative design thus takes on symbolic
functions as much as it does pragmatic.
As the caravans of digital nomads increase globally, we must begin a new syphoning strategy to channel
these flows into regenerative regions. Only through local, national, and global cooperation and a new
sense of determination, altruism, and collective will can we overcome these challenges and be effective
in dealing with the challenges of climate change and displacement. These precarious situations must
bring out the best in humanity if we are able to pull off this dazzling feat and grand task before us. For
many, this refugee crisis and exodus shines a light on the trace footsteps of our direct lineage today and
ancestral connections through all time.
It is important to place significance on the need for a civilizational transformation and evolution while
retaining some of the social and political infrastructure that has supported humanity to achieve certain
levels of advancement and cooperation. While studies may show that climate change can be resolved
through the planting of a trillion trees (see Image 1.5), we must remind ourselves that climate change is
only a symptom of a deeper challenge that it is our forms of social organization have not been calibrated
to be in balance with the natural environment and each other via hyper cooperation to ensure peace
and unprecedented prosperity and advancement in knowledge, understanding, and capacity to move
our species forward. New systems must be built, and we must build them by leveraging existing
architecture as we innovate new forms of hypermodern collaboration and collective co-existence.
Image 1.5. Reforestation study conducted by the Federal Swiss Institute of Technology

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Throughout human history new forms of organization have often happened as the result of an ending
conflict. We are at a unique junction in history, where, for the first time, while we are experiencing the
initial waves of an impending global crisis, we have the opportunity to reset course. We have the ability
to collectively design the future we would like to bring into being in anticipation of tremendous
adversity. The refugee and climate crisis challenges are already bigger than any one nation can solve on
their own. In fact, even our global governance systems are already buckling under this initial strain of
massive displacement. In addition, we can anticipate many global problems such as widespread
destruction from flooding and droughts in addition to the structural problems of increasing inequality.
The factors combine to create perilous conditions. If we hastily tear down existing institutions, we risk
creating a structural rift where mechanisms like war and conflict often arise to fill the void. Our
transformative strategies are therefore better served if we innovate revolutionary designs and posit
them within existing governance and economic systems to enhance their capacities and promote global
stability as we collectively march forward and build another world we believe and know to be possible.
Re-thinking Global Governance for O-2035 Displaced Persons Population: Iterative Devolution for
Bioregional Regenerative Settlement Construction and Buildout
Following the end of second world war we created two principal mechanisms to manage global peace,
humanitarian aims, and prosperity: the Bretton Woods development banks and the Universal
Declaration for Human Rights within the United Nations framework. The International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank financial institutions focused on macro and micro economic policies and
infrastructure to bring countries into a global trading system as a mechanism for economic growth and
development. The latter provided a normative framework and set of institutions to guide international
humanitarian efforts to ensure planetary citizens a basic set of fundamental rights and have access to
essential services and other quality of life benefits so they can survive and thrive. Of the 180 signatories,
many countries have created complementary national laws to enshrine basic rights and also guide the
practical domestic implementation of human rights such as policies regarding refugee resettlement.
While at the surface these two paradigms may seem to be complementary, their institutional designs
actually set them in competition for resources. The fundamental divergence of these two approaches
are based on the fact that while financial institutions are based on financial return on investments (e.g.
profits), state social safety net mechanims are typically a subsidized practice whereas the positive
externalities are assumed but not directly accounted for in their expenditures nor designed to create
capitalized returns1
. In competitive systems multiple agents pursue the same goals with various agents
losing out. In cooperative regenerative systems that function on “multiple scales of efficiency” individual
and common goals are achieved even faster through an interconnected system that harnesses and
allocates spillover effects in any regenerative process thus all win, or fare the same, and little is lost.
The international economic development systems have been fractured even further in the past few
decades with the emergence of national and regional development banks such as the Inter-American
1
The implications of this statement are profound in fact most government agencies, save utilities, are designed in
this manner. This is mostly due to, perhaps, the overhead of gleaning those positive externalities.

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Development Bank and Asian Development Bank (see Image 1.6). These state-backed financial
institutions scour the globe seeking to develop infrastructure while promoting their own national self-
interest. These finance approaches create a challenge to global order and structural impetus for latent
conflict to emerge among competing nations. Moreover, investments that promote national self-
interest result in hodgepodge infrastructure projects that often lack global contiguity and cohesiveness.
Image 1.6: Regional Development Banks
In addition to international fracturing, the concentration of financial resources at the top has created an
increasing tendency for over-investment approaches in developing countries. When president Jim Yong
Kim left the World Bank in 2018, he lamented the institution had moved from its initial purpose of
providing microeconomic development investments and other basic infrastructure financing, to selling
development projects to boost the portfolio of global finance. This is a sign of the times, a symptom of
late-stage capitalism. As pervasive structural adjustment policy rollout diminished many borders for
finance and created a world of mostly free-flowing capital, massive investment for infrastructure
projects have largely been built out and have created high levels of national debt. Thus, the next frontier
in wealth accumulating global finance is in concentrated and highly targeted urban investments
massively distributed around the globe. This phenomenon of over-concentrated investment also occurs
in American and other developed cities today. So much wealth has been concentrated up at the top that
these financial institutions strike investment deals and inject staggering amounts of capital into cities.

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When concentrated financial investment is focused on limited parcels or entire settlements of a city, it
creates volatility in property values and throws the system out of balance causing asymmetric
development patterns. This gentrification undervalues the importance of cultural context and social
continuity in place-making thus undermining the efforts of to ensure a resilient and thriving community.
This is compounded by the fact that the banks were never really good at things like democracy and
engaging residents in participatory processes of collaborative governance in the first place. Their global
investment portfolio is fundamentally geared towards profiting producers over disempowered
consumers rather than integrating the prosumer and co-producer into collaborative governance
processes. As such citizens and small business have always been more so removed from financial
investment decision making thus deterring the creation of robust solutions that garner the broad
support of diverse and heterogenous publics in local, national, and regional development decisions.
Moreover, these institutions, organized under the logic of competition further pit nation against nation
in a winner take all International Relations scenarios As global finance for development is organized
under an extractivist logic, we all lose either through structural confrontation among nations or
overconsumption of natural resources; both of which intrinsic properties of the system. This investment
paradigm has reached its limits and cannot sustain the next evolutionary phase of our global human
development which is better served via regenerative approaches which can be built into the existing
global governance system.
Image 1.7 The United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva
At the other end of the spectrum, Human Rights and refugee regimes have created a plethora of
international and national approaches that prioritize things like human development, democracy,

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international cooperation, and refugee protection in cases of asylum. These programs align with how
the state system functions to provide essential services and social safety nets to citizens or guests in
cases of asylum. Yet these approaches, while ascribing to our higher values of individual and community
well-being, have been overwhelmed by a lack of funding and exponentially increasing levels of diaspora.
The lack of funding argument eclipses a more subtle and paradoxical irony: while many Human Rights
organizations promote “self-sufficiency” for asylum seekers, the institutions themselves have not been
designed to be self-sustaining and thus require continues injections of capital with no direct return to
the institutions for the value they create in providing their services. This design flaw is now threatening
their survival as they structurally bend under the weight of the unprecedented strain of mass exodus.
These institutions require constant injections of currency from charitable contributions and government
subsidies while the value they produce are not “seen” nor channeled back into the system. This
unaccounting of the positive externalities is a structural blind-spot which appears as an inefficiency. In
reality, this dark matter of positive externalities is produced but because our current homogenized
currency system is too abstract and too simplified and it is not able to distill the subtle and nuanced
forms of value that are generated in our caring for one another and channel that value directly back into
the mechanisms that have contributed to generating these individual, community, and societal benefits.
This is a paradox because no one denies that altruistic acts such as providing shelter, necessities and
investments into human capital development are not fundamentally in line with our regenerative goals.
The question is then, how can we ensure our humanitarian investment has net benefits that can be
readily quantified and never externalized from the system so we can maximize our net return on global
human development? We don’t ask this in a crude extractive sense yet, there needs to be quantifiable
value that can be optimized and circulated throughout the system while not sacrificing or distorting the
structural capacity and mandates of these organizations to work with and lift-up those most in need.
A technology now exists that will move us past this divide and can help bring us into a new regenerative
era. The implications of the proper design and roll out of this technology should not be underestimated.
Digital ledger technologies, and the creation of new peer currencies have the potential to distill nuanced
and exchangeable value and provide structural mechanisms to accomplish this. Arthur Bock, prominent
crypto-currency designer for Holo, claims we “have hidden a mountain of value behind a mole hill of
money”. This is brought to light as social connection practitioner Paul Borne points out over 70% of
healthcare is unaccounted for and undervalued in our current economic system. This represents a
systematic loss of energy that is continually put into the system and, in its current form, is
unrecoverable nor easily leveraged. We must now create cohesive institutional designs and mechanisms
ensuring regenerative value is identifiable, standardized, and exchangeable to ensure a positive return
on investment for democratic, humanitarian, and natural capital development. Doing so, traditional
subsidy problems that perennially plague public agency performance will evaporate. Moreover, the
political rift between fiscal conservatives and humanitarian liberals on this issue should subside. Yet,
peer currencies on their own are not sufficient to tackle the problem of displacement.
The consequences of conflicts, global hyper-inequality, and unprecedented environmental degradation
have created a number of refugees that our current global system is not practically structured nor
calibrated to absorb, let alone predicted displaced persons by 2050 which is now estimated to be in the
tens of millions. We have the paramount responsibility to restructure these financial and humanitarian
institutions to be able to manage the current crisis and the projections in the next few decades. And we

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must do so not by tearing down the mechanisms that we are familiar with, rather we must redesign out
of these institutions to ensure the latent risk of global system rupture is negated.
To effectively deal with the present and projected displacement crisis, we should divest from
international development banks and re-channel our investment to create new programs and
institutional arrangements through the existing of displaced populations programs such as R2R, ORR,
UMWRS, etc.) and work to create seamless connections and routine procedures across global, national,
local government levels. Moreover, we must develop a hyper-local regenerative planning approach that
coordinates and synthesizes the efforts of hundreds of thousands of rural towns, cities and metropolitan
areas across the globe that provides nuanced mechanisms for gleaning resettlement opportunities and
strengthens government capacity and performance in ensuring human development through the rolling
out of regenerative economic value chains and hypermodern collaborative democratic processes.
Existing resettlement institutions and programs must be greatly expanded and redesigned in the next 4
years so they can become more robust and more effective in the next decades as we integrate planetary
inhabitants into regenerative settlements the world over. Regenerative settlements draw strength from
their human inhabitants and embedded natural ecology in an iterative process of use and
replenishment. Regenerative human settlements restore natural capital as the terrestrial land use
patterns are recalibrated in a changing climate. As we transition from a subsidized care system to one
that distills and exchanges new regenerative value, regional refugee settlements will circulate value
within and across nested ecologies and contribute to global solidarity and prosperity while solving the
atmospheric problems and restoring biodiversity. We must now begin to systematically reassess and
improve how we are planning for and resolving the displacement crisis in a manner that rebuilds our
regional settlements across the planet while interfacing United Nations global governance mechanisms.
International Planning Recipient Spatial Allocation Strategies – Displaced Persons Population 0-2035
There is one principal factor that we need to address to fundamentally transform the capacity of the
United Nations and state governments approaches to solving the displacement crisis. At the heart of the
discrepancy is the difference in how engineers attempt to solve a problem and how policy makers go
about providing solutions. Our entire international refugee system is based on a policy that obligates
countries to house a certain percentage of refugees. For example, the United States agrees to receive
1% of asylum cases from United Nations designated refugees. Additionally, the United States under the
1980 Refugee Law establishes a “ceiling” to house a certain number of asylum seekers. What both of
these quantitative and policy approaches have in common is that they are not in any way fixed to the
actual demand of displaced persons in what is attempting to be solved. The 1% or the 100k thousand
refugees ceiling is a number that policy makers arbitrarily decided to symbolically alleviate the problem
rather than provide a viable mechanism to solving the issue. This symbolic approach is very different
than how a system engineer for a utility goes about planning to provide 100% renewable energy to
every home of a city. To solve the displacement crisis, we need to set a goal of saying we are going to
work towards a 0-Displaced Persons population by a certain timeframe. This changes the dynamic of
how the problem is defined and how we can go about solving it through local and global cooperation.

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The temporal dimension in resolving the problem cannot be underestimated in our planning design.
While the overload may already be overwhelming for our national and global governance systems and
psychologically for displaced persons alike, this problem is made more difficult by the fact that the
problem will grow exponentially in the next several decades. We must remind ourselves that this
apparent incapacity is simply a systemic flaw and something that we are able to correct. Therefore, we
must invest in the overhead of ramping up and redesigning our approaches with the long view in mind.
The time required to implement these solutions means we must design our resettlement approach to
function at an absorption capacity that intercepts projected levels of displaced persons in the next one
to two decades until we have ebbed the impacts of climate change that we are already experiencing.
Figure 1.3: 0-Displaced Persons 2035: Hypothetical resettlement intercept to conceptualize accelerated placement after crossing the community engagement lag-
time threshold. This visualization is provided to be provocative and conceptual. Temporal refinement is being calibrated
Unfortunately, the global governance response has been completely inadequate and has more so
distanced itself from a full-fledged commitment and approach to resolving the issue. The United Nation
Global Compact on Refugees (2018) evokes normative appeals of Human Rights yet structurally
prioritizes compensating countries that “deal” with the “burden” of refugees and further shifts the risk
and responsibility of solving the issue more towards civic organizations and charity. While ngo and
charitable actions should be a part of the solution, the reticulate nature of the network structure is
inconsistent and means they are incapable of providing comprehensive solutions in a manner of how a
government apparatus is structured and carries out consistent and pervasive action. Most of the
response has been reactionary and has not obligated states to rebuild ecologies, economies, and
democracies in states that are the sources of displacement. This is in no way acceptable and we must

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push the UN to strengthening it’s institutional connection and systematic coordination with national and
local governments in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East in a comprehensive and routine manner.
In the vacuum of global leadership, nations have formed loosely structured regional forums to attempt
to promote state cooperation. In Latin America, a regional forum has met ever decade since the 1980s.
From these meetings, various declarations have been made with Plan Mexico 2004 being the main
guiding normative framework. The African Union has also taken up the issue of refugees and hosting
regular regional forums. The European Union collectively defined a range of status of displaced persons
and mechanisms for protection to be granted. These forums all work across national governments and
with the United Nations yet are in no way organized to solve the issue of resettling displaced persons.
Regional Refugee Planning Approaches in Latin America & Africa
In other cases, regional forums have sprung up ad-hoc such as in the Regional Refugee Response (RRR)
Plan of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the past several years, systematic violence has been
carried out against civilian populations which has caused millions of people to flee. This effort is largely
organized through the United Nations and has made various systematic planning efforts in direct
cooperation with national and municipal governments and non-governmental organizations. An
important note is that while the RRR Planning has focused primarily on receiving people who flee the
conflict versus attempting to mitigate the violence that is causing people to leave in the first place.
The RRR requires neighboring nations to create formalized plans that determine the number of refugees
they can host and how they will provide food, education, and health services. The plans are fairly
sophisticated and represent a systematic approach to displacement planning that needs to be further
strengthened. While national governments can be an important supporting planning actor, the emphasis
on supporting municipalities and strengthening local government should not be underestimated
because these are sites, locales, where resettlement and new settlements are operationalized. National
governments can help in terms of granting visas and citizenship based upon the numbers local
communities determine are possible. Moreover, in cases where corruption is highly localized a removed
actor, such as the national level, can disrupt local networks to assist local communities to restructure.

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Figure 1.4. – The Democratic Republic of Congo Regional Refugee Response Plan
The 2004 Plan Mexico has also instrumentalized municipal, national, and United Nations cooperation in
dealing with displaced peoples. The regional forum itself has functioned to take the wholistic approach
of the need of the region while encouraging the national governments of Latin America and the United
Nations Refugee Council to cooperate in specific aspects of the resettlement process. This global to
national coordination, is rather ad-hoc and not comprehensive nor routinely conducted.
One important initiative in Latin America is a program called “Solidary Cities”. Many municipalities in
Central, South America, and the Caribbean have received a growing level of support among urban
municipalities that volunteer to host displaced peoples in their jurisdiction. This program has even
created a standard approach to providing housing, employment, skills training, and other services.
Moreover, they have focused on elements of social cohesion by conducting public relations campaigns
with local media o ensure new arrivals are welcomed into the community and seen as an asset.

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These regional forums however are largely voluntary and do not create binding decisions. Moreover,
many key countries are noticeably absent. For example, the United States and Canada have not
participated in any of the Latin American forums.
Moreover, cooperation among Europe and the African Union is perhaps another missed opportunity for
regional cooperation. Yet, regional cooperation in this sense prioritizes an even further distanced actor
than the nation-state which is more removed from the actual problem. As immigration is an issue that
affects all, and particularly at the local level, there is much incentive for countries to begin collaborating
with their hemispherical neighbors. The support of European countries, the United States, and Canada
have traditionally focused more so on accepting refugees yet these countries also need to step up with a
direct response to support local government resolve displacement issues in Latin America and Africa.
Yet these direct responses are still not collectively coordinated across countries nor are displaced
systematically placed within each country through a consistent network of state agencies. The numbers
of resettled asylum requests are based upon the political leadership and context of the country from
year to year and vary significantly. Figure 1.3 demonstrates the number of resettled asylum persons in
the United States over the past thirty years which show dramatic fluctuations that are not directly
correlated to the number of refugees or asylum requests they receive.
Figure 1.5 Asylum and Resettlement Statistics for the United States 1990-2016

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What is clear is the need to create policies that determine the amount of persons to be resettled based
upon the existing and projected demand. Moreover these resettlements must be coordinated across
cities and nations to find optimal placements. In order to operationalize these quantitative
determinations and spatial allocations global governance institutions must be buttressed by a seamless
integrate set of national and municipal government planning efforts. A relational global governance
architecture that establishes and allocates authority and responsibilities among specific United Nations
agencies, national government actors, rural towns and city agencies that can manage displacement as it
occurs and attempts to prevent diaspora from occurring at it’s source.
A redesign strategy that can be effective in preventing diaspora must also address the underlining
problems of the extractive economies that cause environmental degradation and hyper-inequality, and
create the conditions for mass migrations. Thus solving these problems requires a hyper-localized and
ubiquitous approach in building regenerative human settlements that create prosperity, rebuild natural
capital, strengthen communities and support collaborative democratic processes in rural towns, cities,
and metropolitan areas of and across bioregions.
Finessing the Physics of Bio-regional Resettlement Building: Carrying Capacity, Participatory
Governance and Endogenous Economic Development underlining a New Global Governance Paradigm
At the heart of an effective transformation strategy capable of resolving the growing displacement
problem on our planet is the reorganization of rural towns, cities, and metropolitan areas into
bioregional regenerative human settlements that are interconnected into a new global governance
paradigm. Doing so, can solve the climate crisis, mitigate natural resource scarcity, reduce conflict, and
lift billions of planetary inhabitants up and into new prosperity via regenerative economic development.
While the United Nations was first created to privilege the nation-state as the principal acting agent, it is
in local governance arenas where human communities, economies, ecologies, and democracies must be
equipped with new authorities, responsibilities, and collective processes to plan and resettle current and
projected refugees as to sustain our growing human population. Moreover, the current discourse and
misperception of refugees being labeled as a burden must be flipped so we see them as an asset an
opportunity to integrate into our communities. This is in fact an artefact from extractive economic
systems where profit is maximized above all else and human beings and the environment are treated as
problems that need to be externalized. The Human Rights regime clearly establishes the responsibility of
government to ultimately ensure equal rights and privileges, accesses to essential services and other
attributes so that human beings and the natural environment can flourish. To achieve this goal, we must
examine how this can, in part, be ensured through a regenerative bioregional settlement design.
Carrying Capacity and Nested Ecological Scales of Regenerative Bioregional Settlements
Cities, towns, and metropolitan areas form regenerative settlements across a bioregion. They are by
design integrally connected within their ecological landscapes as to regenerate the natural capital of
which their populations and economic activity are interwoven. As inhabitants produce and exchange
regenerative value, they replenish, restore, and balance the soil, biodiversity, surface and ground water,

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and atmospheric composition. Population planning and land-use planning of human settlements are
strategically juxtaposed and intrinsically connected in nested ecological scales in which they reside. This
is a relevant topic to regenerative dis/placement strategies as populations and the built environment are
optimized to balance natural capital and carrying capacity parameters. Urban and regional planning and
migration policies are already emerging in settlements across the globe to design cities and natural
resource use within a carrying capacity. The city Beijing, for example, has a policy that places caps on the
amount of people that can move into the city limits based upon the available water supply. Yet, this
particular population-natural resource management approach, as others that measure the urban water
footprint, are limited in the sense that they are not connected to the entire physical geography nor does
it take into account the amount of water required for food production and industrial use. Various
regenerative bioregional approaches being innovated across the globe prioritize self-sustainability and
take a more integral natural resource approach to accounting for water cycling occurring in the region.
As rural towns, cities, and metropolitan area populations go through dynamic cycles of birth, death, and
migration, population management in connection with natural resource management is an important
consideration for global refugee resettlement strategies.
Image 1.8 The Sinai Peninsula, as a nested ecological scale apt for bioregional regenerative settlements, provides a hopeful site of possible
Middle Eastern, Northern African international cooperation and the symbolic regeneration of our shared history and interconnection.

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Effectively combining the intersections of natural ecology, population planning, and dynamic land-use
designations, ensures bioregional residents have access to essential and other quality of life services.
Specifically, proper management and allocation of residential, commercial, and natural areas land-use
parcels is needed. As the problems of climate change, inequality, and conflict cause more and more
populations groups to resettle, cities are quickly growing around the world. This rapid urbanization most
often results in poorly planned settlements in which new residents are not accounted for in cadastral
registries nor are the spatial distributions of housing settlements optimized, thus creating challenges for
public service provision, producing social tensions, and straining regenerative economic development.
Peruvian Nobel economist Hernando de Soto Polar claims poor people are poor in developing countries
because they lack access to property rights. While at face value this argument seems logical, it denies
the reality that allocating property rights to poor people can simply be used as a way to justify moving
people off of their land as property developers pay bottom dollar to impoverished and desperate people
who often have no other choice but to sell. This is magnified by policies that treat housing as a
commodity and not as a human right. Yet, from an access to essential services and regional regenerative
planning perspective, with proper land redistribution and housing policies (e.g. land trusts, cooperatives,
affordable housing, etc.), the standardization and allocation of parcels provide important value to urban
and rural dwellers and creates additional spillover effects such as raising the value of monetary currency
and raising human development by augmenting private and public capacity to co-produce network
services such as housing, renewable energy, water and sanitation, food, and smart city infrastructure.
This is why the policy work in South Africa to redistribute land and standardize and digitize land parcels,
should be increased and replicated in other nations across the continent. And when we connect these
regenerative bioregional processes into the United Nations governance apparatus, we create upward
scalar channels to harness prosperity. At minimum, by reducing the costs we all pay from the instability
poor spatial planning and extractive economics cause, and in nuanced ways like how regenerative
regions build human capital, social cohesion, and biodiversity to enrich our global community.
Through standardized and ubiquitous parceling and land-use and natural resource modeling, we can
determine regenerative population planning scenarios which provide a foundational baseline for rural
towns, cities, and metropolitan areas to designate specific areas for regenerative resettlement and can
assist to determine the amount and types of new demographic groups that can optimally be housed and
economically integrated into a regional while maintaining balance with the natural surroundings. These
local efforts should be replicated for gleaning refugee resettlement efforts in a broader global strategy.
Rethinking Community and Social Cohesion in Regenerative Placement Strategies
Human Rights law enacts various profiling strategies to regenerate individual human beings subjected to
trauma and to promote social cohesion in resettlement practices. This individual and community
profiling occurs at the international, national and local levels. Residents in large-scale refugee camps in
Africa for example, are profiled to determine their relative need for social services and physical safety.
For instance, people fleeing war torn areas or places subject to paramilitary and gang violence, are
deemed a higher priority for resettlement. The United States, and other countries, have agreements to
take the 1% of these priority designated refugees. Once the US State Department has agreed to resettle

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persons, they have national placement strategies to move individuals, families, and groups of individuals
into towns, cities, and metropolitan areas.
These international to national to local level resettlement strategies thus involve placement criteria that
can identify and better ensure social cohesion. One of the most common prioritizing criteria is whether
the refugee has family residing in a locality. This individual or family demographic type indicator is
relatively straight- forward. Other large-scale immigrant settlement strategies are more complex and
have attempted to distribute cohorts of displaced persons and demographic groups across a myriad of
cities as to not overwhelm a particular population.
Massive transfers of refugees must be intricately planned with local and standardized demographic data
to mitigate unintended consequences. The 1990’s resettlement of Hmong population allocated families
across major urban cities of the United States created many social issues. As the elders of these families
mostly communicated through spoken word, they did not have written literacy skills. Thus, in major
urban areas parents (and grandparents) were less effective in parenting which lead to high levels of
youth crime. Moreover, Hmong families were mostly farmers and placing them to major cities created
difficulties in finding employment and produced culture shock that limited effective enculturation.
Hmong families recalibrated themselves and began moving to rural areas of the United States to be
closer to the agricultural lifestyle they were accustomed to. Moreover, when they are relocated, they
often emigrated as families and groups of family cohorts rather than individuals. This means placement
profiling needs to be deepened and consider other cultural factors in addition to trade skills, dietary
preferences, education levels and be applied at the individual and community level. The Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in Philadelphia, is creating a wider range of nuanced indicators that employ
prioritization placement algorithms to assist resettling individuals and cohorts to build healthy, happy,
and prosperous communities composed of many types of groups. In many localities in Africa this is
relative, as individuals and groups from with conflicting tribal affiliations have sometimes been resettled
in proximity in other cases building borders walls and arbitrary borders separate cooperating groups.
Thus, placement strategies should include cultural indicators to ensure large scale population transfers
of diverse peoples to prevent fragmentation and actually increase social connectivity, cultural harmony,
and collective actions. Proactively, injecting new settlements and investments into communities that
have long-term systematic violence could disrupt conflicts and create new cohesive cultural patterns.
Profiling practice in resettlement strategies can be further deepened to promote new channels in how
new arrivals are presented and integrated into the existing community. Contemporary political
discourse in the US and Europe, and even the United Nations normative policies, often frame the
receiving refugees as bearing “a burden”. Initiatives like Solidarity Cities in Latin America have
attempted to reframe the issue and pioneered conducting public relations campaigns and press
conferences to welcome newly settled persons to a community. Public relations campaigns across an
entire city use a macro level broad brush, whereas hyper-targeted social network strategies could be
proactively promoted. For example, to allocate some of the investment cities receive to resette refugees
towards ensuring the local populations directly benefit and to expand existing resident involvement in
an integral socializing role; particularly in the creation of eco-enterprises that compose diverse persons
with complementary skill-sets that collaborate to build out the regenerative economic value chains.
One of the base systems of regenerative economics is to create self-sustaining bioregional human
settlements. As we transition to regenerative systems in rural towns, cities across a region,

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entrepreneurial and employment opportunities arise in new sectors such as regenerative farming,
reforestation fishing, biodiversity preservation, renewable energy, and e-transportations systems.
Endogenous growth does not negate value exchange among bioregions, rather it promotes self-
sufficient housing, energy, food, water, education, health-care, internet and communications, and other
essential and quality of life services. Regional endogenous economic growth strategies thus create a
growing demand for new types of sustainable businesses, such as eco-enterprises in these regenerative
sectors. Business ownership and employment opportunities can be allocated both to refugees and to
existing members of the community to promote social cohesion. Profiling at this meso-enterprise level,
can be optimized to place existing residents of an area with newly resettled counterparts to community
orientation and assist with language barriers and share cultural perspectives. Currently, United States
Refugee Law (1980) provides mechanisms for voluntary community organizations to work with Offices
Refugee Resettlement to provide language instruction, assistance with living arrangements, social
services, and employment opportunities. Expanding upon this and providing incentives and mechanisms
for composing regenerative enterprises can thus provide a sustained and effective socialization process,
deepening ties with among individuals leading to more resilient, interwoven, and happy communities.
Community Engagement in Resettlement, Regenerative Finance & Gamifying Hypermodern Economic-Democracy
Resettling displaced persons on a massive scale under current extractive economic model appears to be
a significant cost burden that is difficult to recoup a return on the financial investment and creates
conflicts in communities. Yet with sophisticated institutional redesign and hyper-coordinated collective
action entire systemic movements can be generated by reweaving sectoral threads across rural towns,
cities and metropolitan centers can be rewoven in regenerative bioregional settlements. The
Regenerative Communities Network led by Jon Fullerton is pioneering theory and practical applications
of peer currencies, regenerative finance, and gamified democratic-economic processes to spark hyper-
cooperation and social cohesion across regenerative value chains as inhabitants co-produce and
exchange regenerative goods and services that rebuild ecological landscapes and create prosperity. At
all points in the circular process - from planning refugee placement strategies to rolling out regenerative
value chains - hyper-modern community engagement methods are important inputs to keep
participatory democracies cycling. Building regenerative regions requires front-loaded investment in
consulting publics in anticipation to resettlement in addition to get people to opt into the process.
Local leadership often function as the brokers to initiate resettlement processes. City councilors,
mayors, urban planning departments, and civic organizations can provide the catalyst to leverage public
sentiment of rural towns and cities into a welcoming arena ready to house new arrivals. An American
City Councilor, In Boise, Idaho, Tecle Gebremichael, a first-generation immigrant from Ethiopia, for
example, has leveraged his position to push policies and communities to rally around the idea of hosting
new arrivals from Northern Africa. While cities and rural towns have often stepped up to push for
sanctuary policies to shelter asylum seeker from oppression in the face of federal government policing
efforts, more proactive work needs to be done to get local governments to apply upward pressure
towards national government and global governance institutions to send more asylum seekers.
The prevalence of local democratic institutions provides a structural impetus and platform for collective
action to assist in leveraging resettlement opportunities. Whereas, national governments may face the
fallout from highly organized and vocal sectors that may resist immigration, it is at the local level where

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community conversations begin to take place. Thus, launching a systematic and broad-scale democratic
process to estimate the amount of refugees that can potentially be housed in a town or city is a strategic
starting point. That is, some of the most important gains in numbers for resettlement can be gleaned
from willing cities and rural towns.
As more towns and cities glean refugee opportunities displacement flow will be reversed and cities will
be requesting refugees at a demand the reduces refugee camps and in the other precarious and
unsustainable living contexts. The critical mass willing towns and cities across this planet already exists,
it just takes mobilizing and coordinating our efforts now. The effort will be contagious, as more cities
sign on, so too will more nations in a robust display of solidarity. to not only solve our refugee problem
but restore biodiversity and reverse climate change through regenerative terraforming settlements. As
such the closer we get towards 0-2035 Displaced Persons Population, the more planetary carbon levels
will be brought back to within safe operating levels of at or under 350 ppm.
Figure 1.6 Regenerative Regional Settlement Buildout – Atmospheric Draw Down & Terraforming. While most atmospheric carbon projections
are based reduced emissions, regenerative bioregions sequester carbon and thus provide a terraforming function which can be optimized
Resettling refugees in regenerative bioregional settlements, also requires building out the critical
infrastructure that can support hypermodern regenerative economic-democratic processes. Creating
bioregional regenerative food systems, for example, requires the construction of processing facilities.
The rollout of e-vehicle distribution systems requires electric charging stations, a network of distribution
hubs, and in some cases customized e-vehicles. Moreover, peer currencies and gamified governance
require social networking platforms in addition to new inventorying and value chain inventory systems.

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Moreover, the networks of supporting businesses and patrons must be created through sweeping
community engagement processes. Regenerative finance methods such as co-finance, purchase pledges
from patrons, production commitments from regenerative enterprises must also be orchestrated.
Moreover, the creation of connective tissue such as cooperatives and shared production spaces also
contribute to getting the regenerative economy up and running. This work takes an incredible amount
of organizing and highly targeted social network strategies, to nudge the right actors at the right time.
Highly organized cohesive communities can thus demonstrate the return on investments that ushering
in a regenerative bioregional economy can provide. While these activities like required organizational
work, planning and analysis may seem like a diffuse and daunting task, with the right policy frameworks
a regenerative webwork can sew together and guide these participatory collective action processes to
accelerate the conversion to regenerative bioregional settlements that create value as they resettle
displaced persons and integrate more of their local community into these revolutionary democratic-
economic systems.
The latent potential of a full-scale regenerative transition can be brought to fruition through policies like
The Green New Deal (GND). As the extractive economic paradigm has reached it’s limits, societies must
rewrite their social contract and create massive investments into community building and building out
the infrastructure to usher in the regenerative economies. While discussion in national deliberative
representative institutions have stalled, rural towns, cities, and metropolitan areas that compose
bioregions have tremendous incentive to create GND Regional Amendments. These polices can be
sculpted to provide further structural incentive and framework to guide, operationalize, and accelerate
the integration of resettled persons and the build out of regenerative economic value chains across our
bioregional settlements. The advantage of organizing at the local level in this context is the shear
number of localities across the globe and the ability to take the least resistance path to continued
forward progress in the implementation and buildout of regenerative settlements the world over.
Image 1.7 The Green New Deal is thought of as an American and English policy, yet it’s application should be global

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The Green New Deal can be designed to create a new model for regenerative development and global
governance that can both usher in the creation of regenerative regions to sustain our planet’s
population while also solving the refugee crisis. Strategic planning of regenerative regions can act as a
pump to syphon and redistribute refugee flows into restorative human settlements across the Americas,
Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. These GND regional amendments should thus connect to
regional, state, national and United Nation government mechanisms to direct regenerative finance and
transform capital flows within a global platform-governance system from which all nations and citizens
benefit. This hyper-local yet upward scalar collaborative platform approach thus has implications for
conceiving global governance.
From Local to the Global: Reimagining Regenerative Bioregions in a Global Governance Context
The Global Compact on Refugees (2018) is a watered-down policy that primarily relies upon voluntary
network of civic organizations to perform the job of what should be government and regenerative
economic institutions as principal actors. Of course, charity and civic organizations are part of the vital
currency of any thriving democracy, yet they are diffuse organizations that lack cohesive structure and
thus cannot be expected to lead the integration and resettlement policies. Rural towns, cities, nation-
states, and global governance systems must be step up and reintegrated and new polices created to
guide the investment, protect fleeing refugees, and operationalize the resettlement process.
As Green New Deal Regional Amendments and Solidarity Cities type programs proliferate, national
governments must create new mechanisms to attach and support cities in this process. Moreover,
global governance institutions must create additional spaces for cities to directly access the global
sphere and coordinate their actions across countries, hemispheres, and our planet. While initiatives like
C40 and UN Habitat have created initial spaces, more work needs to be done and there are positive
signs that change is on the horizon. The proposal from Senator Elizabeth Warren to dramatically expand
the United States State Department to assist with migration and resettlement strategies is a promising
policy to follow. Certainly, the election in 2020 of the United States have dramatic consequences on
whether the world retreats and fragments or is reinvigorated and expands to meet the unprecedented
challenges and recoup the unprecedented gains that ushering in a regenerative economic system offers.
One important initiative for the institutions of global governance should be to create the standardized
data sets among towns, cities, nations, and united nations for measuring and projecting migration flows
and to create policies to nudge and retain and grow bioregions for the strategic placement and building
of community and terraforming settlements. Shared tool sets that provide the digital infrastructure for
cooperation and collective action in resolving our global challenges of today and tomorrow.

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I am a sixth generation Dutch/German American. And a few generations Canadian-American, some of
us. Many of us Native American, African American, Latin American, and across this planet of nations we
are Hmong, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Russian, European and much more.
We are a multicultural global society. Family ties and lineages are one of the most resilient mediums and
easiest to mend. We need to realize our global interconnection now more than ever as we roll up our
sleeves and dig in for the battle to preserve humanity and life on this planet. This cannot be done by
piecemeal national initiatives but through genuine collaboration across our global commons. As some
leaders would have us dig in for global conflict, it’s fair and resonate to play the “the family card” and
look back at our historical connections to spark the spirit of collective action. If we trace the migration
routes and caravans back to their source, we can see that our cultural lineage that moves through out
human settlements today. Now is the time we need each other most to evoke our sense of global
community and shared commitment to regenerating our planet.
Economic systems that create value do not have to be winner take all games. In fact, if we want to
prosper as a global community they cannot. We must redesign our economic systems to be regenerative
and create value for all human beings and diverse life on this planet.
Across the collective action spectrum, we see the power of protest to leverage out of existing modes of
domination, spur the articulation of norms and procedures to codify collaborative global governance,
and create new currencies which are the lifeblood of regenerative regions. These movements are
speeding up in the quickening and our global convergence of solidarity is closer than ever before.
While this is a global movement, from here in the United States, it’s easy to see that our political
revolution is quite real. The changing political landscape and outlooks is promoting new channels for

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international cooperation. While the last sentiments of overt racism are swept under the rug,
representatives are rolling out the red carpet of a new foreign policy. Restoring peace and ending
refugee crisis means places like Palestine and Somalia should take precedence. Establishing Green New
Deals in Puerto Rico and in many countries across Latin America and Africa should take priority as
national goals. While the immigration problems at the United States and Mexico border are in many
ways a manufactured crisis, there are very real issues that must be resolved to ebb the displacement
tide. Resettling refugees in rural towns and cities of the United States through regional Green New Deal
amendments also offer opportunity to reinvest in rural America and create new 5G connected cities.
Open borders between neighboring countries like Canada and Mexico and progressive resettlement
policies the world over bring out the best in all of us and demonstrate the spirit of solidarity. It is with
great anticipation as we move forward steadily and swiftly to collectively build out the regenerative
settlements and placemaking at an unprecedented scale, to bring our planetary atmosphere in balance
and to prepare ourselves for new journeys of epic proportions as new planets emerge upon the horizon
just before the dawn of a new era in global cooperation, peace, and regenerative co-existence.